Friday, December 18, 2015

Camille Paglia does not disappoint. As an older feminist,
one who has been through it all, Paglia has a unique perspective from which to
judge the strange rumblings arising from the souls of today’s feminists. (Via Maggie’s Farm)

She is not amused. Not only is she not amused, she is not
impressed by the way that today’s feminists have taken leave of reality. They
have become totalitarian cupcakes, too weak to deal with anything that happens
to them, decrying any male who would attempt to protect them, but crying out
for the state to shield them from life's torments.

Paglia explains:

I am
continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by
today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naïve helplessness in
asserting control over their own dating lives. Female undergraduates incapable
of negotiating the oafish pleasures and perils of campus fraternity parties are
hardly prepared to win leadership positions in business or government in the
future.

Point well taken. How can you expect a woman who is
incapable of handling herself in a fraternity party to be able to compete
successfully for a leadership position? Why would anyone in the corporate world
respect her? Lacking confidence in one significant area of her life, she can
hardly be expected to manifest it in any others.

As for the current efforts to regulate adolescent sexual
behavior to within an inch of its life, Paglia rejects the current wave of
affirmative consent laws:

‘Yes
means Yes’ laws are drearily puritanical and literalistic as well as hopelessly
totalitarian. Their increasing popularity simply demonstrates how boring and
meaningless sex has become – and why Hollywood movies haven’t produced a
scintilla of sexiness since Sharon Stone uncrossed her legs in Basic Instinct.

Kill off the feminine mystique, eliminate the erotics of
courtship and what do you have? Perhaps you have the strange practice of hooking
up, but at some point women figure out that being used by a man they do not
know for a random sexual encounter provides them with little pleasure. It is
neither liberating nor empowering.

Speaking for her own generation, Paglia explains that when
she and her cohorts in the early days of second-wave feminism fought for
freedom they understood that responsibility comes with freedom. If they wanted
to take risks they bore some responsibility for the consequences:

We
wanted the same freedoms as men, and we took charge of our own destinies. We
viewed life as a continual experiment, an urgent pressing into the unknown. If
we got knocked down, we got up again, nursed our bruises and learned from our
mistakes. Today, in contrast, too many young feminists want their safety,
security and happiness guaranteed in advance by all-seeing, all-enveloping
bureaucracies. It’s a sad, limited and childish view of life that I find as
claustrophobic as a hospital ward.

And finally, Paglia calls out feminists for disparaging
motherhood. After all, feminism can count it as one of its dubious achievements
to have turned pregnancy into “the curse.” She also rejects what she calls feminism’s
“near-hysterical obsession with abortion.” And she denounces feminism for
failing to respect women who choose freely to stay at home to bring up their
children.

She says:

Stay-at-home
moms have been arrogantly disdained by orthodox feminism. This is a primary
reason for the lack of respect that a majority of mainstream citizens has for
feminism, which is addicted to juvenile male-bashing and has elevated abortion
to sacramental status. While I firmly support unrestricted reproductive rights
(on the grounds that nature gives every individual total control over his or
her body), I think that the near-hysterical obsession with abortion has damaged
feminism by making it seem morally obtuse.

Feminism is “morally obtuse.” Whoever would have thought
such a thing?

2 comments:

Paglia: Today, in contrast, too many young feminists want their safety, security and happiness guaranteed in advance by all-seeing, all-enveloping bureaucracies.

Ah, so the 2012 Obama campaign marketing of "The Life of Julia" was a sincere if flawed vision, created within the brainstorming fantasies of the feminists involved in the campaign.http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/09/opinion/bennett-obama-campaign/index.html

I wonder what Hillary's version of Julia will look like?

Paglia's conclusions of what feminists should be fighting for is curious."I want universities to create more flexible, extended-study options for young women who choose to have earlier (and thus safer) pregnancies, and I want more public and private resources devoted to childcare facilities for working parents of every social class. Finally, I call for the investigation and reform of the current systemic exploitation of working-class women (many of them black or Latina immigrants) who have become the invisible new servant class for affluent white women leaving childcare to others as they pursue their feminist professional dreams."

Like other feminists she doesn't mention marriage, or husbands. And what should we make of this "invisible new servant class" being exploited?

What is she really saying? From what I've seen, the BEST path for stay-at-home mothers is to add daycare into their homes and use an economy of scale to supplement her husband's income.

And more strangely most of the career women I know of my Xer generation (35-50) have only one child, or only plan to have one child, while having a single child seems like the MOST INEFFICIENT use of resources possible UNLESS they follow the model above, and specialize, so some women are raising the kids communally, while others are helping to bring home the bacon, in part to pay for the daycare!

Anyway, you can't go wrong with Paglia's advice to young women: "My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself."

So yes, think for yourself, BUT also find other like-minded women, and do that womenly think of cooperating, so you don't have to do everything yourself. And actually it looks like modern connectivity is a godsend, as the mothers I know are fully dependent upon social media for exchanging advice and finding ways to connect up to their extended neighborhood circles for support.

Camille never fails to illuminate. One wonders if H.L. Mencken was not right when he defined "Misogynist: A man who hates women as much as women hate one another." I wonder how he would have defined feminism today given his "Defense of Women?" When one gives up the advantages of being a woman for acting like a man one can see why many women have little use for today's feminism. Many women are just to smart. It does seem as if Puglia is or could be considered the Mencken of Feminism. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-mencken-of-feminism/